For the Love of Money

by Omar Tyree

  “Well, have you heard any of those rumors?” I asked her. I was curious to see if she was already ignoring them and hadn’t said anything to me about it.

  “No I haven’t, and don’t you think that I would have told you something if I heard anything like that. I mean, shit, you’re still my daughter, Hollywood or not.

  “I wouldn’t let anyone say that kind of thing about my daughter. Are you crazy?!” She sounded as pissed off about it as I was. That made me smile. I felt better about it. Mom had my back.

  “And why did you tell everyone that you didn’t like your middle name?” she asked me.

  “I didn’t say that. I said I wasn’t fond of using my middle initial.”

  “Well, what’s so wrong with using Tracy Louise Ellison?”

  I began to laugh as I pulled out from the parking space.

  “Come on, Mom, don’t start that again. ‘Louise’ makes me sound like I’m fifty years old.” In my mind, all I could see was images of Mr. George Jefferson from The Jeffersons hollering “Weee-zaaay!”

  My mom laughed with me and said, “Well, ‘Grant’ doesn’t sound that young, either. It reminds me of the Civil War, and we weren’t free back then, you know.”

  “Some of us weren’t free,” I corrected her.

  “Most of us weren’t,” she argued.

  I said, “Well, Mom, I don’t want to keep running up this phone bill for local calls. I’ll talk to you when I see you at home tonight.”

  “Running up a phone bill,” she snapped at me. “You mean to tell me that you’re making Hollywood money now and you’re still concerned about some phone bill?”

  “Mom, trust me. If you forget that you’re talking on these cellular phones, your monthly bill can get up to as much as a mortgage for a house.”

  She chuckled and said, “;Okay, well, I’ll see you later then. And by the way, was that new silver truck outside a gift for your father’s fifty-first birthday? You know he noticed it. You couldn’t find a better place to hide it than that?”

  I just smiled. “What made you think that?”

  “Girl, I wasn’t born yesterday. And your father wasn’t born yesterday either.”

  “Well, that’s a long story, but I was planning on giving it to him tonight.”

  My mother paused and said, “It looks nice. Now I can’t wait until my birthday,” she added, and started laughing again.

  I pouted and said, “See.”

  “Aw, girl, go ’head somewhere. I don’t want your money,” she told me. “All I did was raise you for half of your life before your father came back in the picture just in time to send you off for college.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say. My mom was playing the guilt trip on me.

  “So now I’m gonna have to buy you and Jason a new car,” I continued to pout. How could I say no to them? They had all put up with a lot of stuff from me.

  My mom said, “You don’t have to buy me a new car, honey. Who do you think will be driving that new SUV that you’re giving to your father? You don’t know the house rules by now? What’s his is mine and what’s mine is mine.”

  We both laughed at it.

  Mom said, “Well, go ’head, girl, and save your little phone bill. I’ll see you later on at the house. And Tracy?”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling. She had cheered me up.

  “I love you.”

  I smiled even wider. “I love you too, Mom.”

  When I hung up to continue with my day, I realized that I couldn’t really cry about anything, because if you look at it, I had everything to look forward to. So I clicked on the stereo system and popped in a CD. I was curious, but I refused to listen to Power 99 FM for a while, because I didn’t want Wendy Williams to surprise me with something else. Hell, I was back in a good damn mood, and I planned to remain that way!

  A Woman’s Liberation

  I grew up a while back

  and took off my tight jeans

  and those other little, skimpy things

  to liberate my body.

  I put away my

  old love letters

  from long-gone boyfriends

  to liberate my heart.

  I discarded my false notions of

  how young ladies should act

  in male-dominated societies

  to liberate my mind.

  I dared to picture myself a heaven,

  so that I could reach

  for a better tomorrow

  to liberate my soul.

  And then I flew

  far away

  like a bird

  in no cage.

  Copyright © 1994 by Tracy Ellison

  July 1996

  When my airplane reached the city limits of Los Angeles the sight of the small houses with palm trees planted all around reminded me of toy houses, as if the capital city of make-believe was only make-believe itself. I could tell that it was a different kind of place, judging from the clothes that people wore on the airplane, and the many nationalities they represented. It was like a styleless and faceless nation where anything goes. Even the flight attendants seemed spirited in their blue uniforms. It made me feel that LA was a place where you could really be free and let yourself go. On the East Coast we were hindered by rigid dress codes and a more structured approach to life, where breaking the rules led to unpleasant whispers, nasty looks, and cold shoulders. However, on the plane to LA all that I could feel was warmth. I felt relaxed, like in a bubble bath, even as the plane experienced turbulence in our preparation for landing.

  When we landed, I undid my seat belt, stood up, and collected my carry-on luggage. As soon as I made it through the bridge and into the Los Angeles Airport terminal I felt overdressed in my coordinated blue and white. Had I just stepped through to the other side of a seventies time warp or what? The people there looked like outright, nonconforming hippies, slackers, and year-around vacationers with nowhere special to go, and no particular time to be there. It even seemed like they were walking in slow motion. I just stopped and stared for a minute with a child’s grin on my face.

  “Hey, Tracy,” my friend Kendra said, once she spotted me standing there.

  We hugged and broke away.

  She said, “Wouldn’t you know it. As soon as I step away to run to the restroom the plane rolls in. How long have you been waiting here?”

  “Actually, I just stepped off of the plane. And you seem to be the only one concerned about the time in here,” I joked to her.

  “Yeah, I’m from Baltimore.”

  She didn’t look it anymore. The Kendra Dayton that I remembered from Hampton wore a conservative hairstyle with just a touch of burgundy dye, and looked uptight half of the time. In LA, her dark brown face looked relieved and glowing. She was wearing hot pink pants, sandals, and her hair was in long braids past her shoulder. Shit, Kendra looked stress free and sexy, like a Gap commercial mixed with Victoria’s Secret. I needed some of that loose, sexy energy myself. I was loving LA before I stepped foot out of the airport!

  “So how was your flight?” Kendra asked me.

  We started walking toward the baggage claim to gather the rest of my things.

  “It was long, but peaceful; just what I needed, more time to sit down and think to myself.”

  I continued to suck in the wide-open feel of the West Coast as we walked. There were even people soliciting inside of the airport. They would never allow that at Philadelphia International. Nor would people give you the time of day to do it.

  I shared my thoughts with Kendra. “So anything goes out here, hunh?”

  She smiled and said, “Basically. And that can be a good and a bad thing.”

  “What’s so bad about it?”

  “It’s hard to get people behind anything,” she answered. “Like the PTA meetings. Forget about it. Parents come in more so to show off and make an appearance than to find out what their kids are doing. Then their kids grow up to be the same way. Superficial.”

  I said
, “At least they don’t tell you how to teach, because that’s what happens on the East Coast, if you can get the parents to come in at all.”

  Kendra grinned and shook her head. “I guess it’s rough for teachers everywhere.”

  “Damn right, and they don’t pay us enough,” I snapped. “But I didn’t fly out here to talk about teaching. I came out here to see if I could trade in my piece of white chalk for a fancy black pen.”

  “Well, I just wish that I could write like that,” Kendra said. “I’d try my luck in the script game too. There’s surely more money in it.” She looked me in my face and said, “Do you know that if you write for a popular television show for just two months you could match the average teachers’ salary, that we work nine months to make, and that’s just writing for the small-time shows.”

  I could not help but to smile. All I could see were dollar signs in front of me and my name rolling through with the credits. The funny thing about all of the scriptwriting talk is that everyone assumed that was what I wanted to do, and that I could even do it. I had never written a script or screenplay before in my life. I guess that once you put a book out and write poetry, people just naturally assume that writing for television and film is easily in reach. I kind of went along with the flow, as if I really knew what the hell I was getting into. However, like Kendra said, even writing for a “small-time” show would beat teaching, and I was ready and willing to learn everything that I needed to know.

  We found my luggage and pulled it from the reclaim wheel, and I followed Kendra out to her car, a Toyota Camry just like mine.

  I dropped my luggage at her trunk and started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked me.

  “Girl, we even drive the same car.”

  “Stop! Is yours red, too?”

  “No, my Camry is black.”

  “Oh, because I was ready to fall out. I have thirty thousand miles on this car. I’ve only had it now for a year and a half.”

  “I hear that people do a lot of driving out here though.”

  “Yeah, and I did more driving because I was exploring things, seeing what it all looked like. Especially after the riots hit out here and everything. I bought myself a map and started navigating.”

  “So, you would be the right person for me to ask where things are?” I asked.

  “Pretty much. Yeah.”

  We tossed my things in the trunk and headed toward the front doors. I couldn’t wait to get out on the road.

  “So, where are you taking me to first?” I sounded like an eager tourist.

  “First I want to drive you back to my place in Carson to let you unpack, and then we can do whatever. I’m glad to have some East Coast company out here for a change. Sometimes the West Coast mind state can get to you, and you start losing touch with what’s really going on in the world.”

  “You mean, it’s that bad out here, where people don’t realize what’s going on?”

  Kendra looked at me with a serious grill. “Child, let me tell you, I don’t know if it’s the warm weather or the earthquakes, but a lot of these people could care less.”

  I began to wonder what made Kendra remain in California with the way that she talked about it.

  “What do you love about being out here in California again?” I asked her with a smirk.

  She caught on to my sarcasm and laughed. “I know, right? I get to beating the place up so bad that you would think I hated it out here. But I guess it’s that love/hate relationship that you have with things you care a lot about. So let’s just put it this way: If I didn’t care about Los Angeles, then I wouldn’t talk about it so much.”

  I smiled. I said, “In that case, the brothers from the Nation of Islam love America more than any of us with the way that they talk.”

  Kendra laughed loud and hard. “Oh, they do love America,” she said. “You don’t see any of them catching that first boat back to Africa, do you? They would just rather they control America than the white man. That’s what their problem is. They want to be in control of the whole boat.”

  We jumped on the expressway for Kendra’s place. As we drove, I took in the palm trees off of the road. They stood some fifty feet tall and seemed to be evenly spaced.

  “I didn’t know that palm trees could get that tall,” I commented.

  Kendra laughed. “Girl, you sound like a kid at an amusement park.”

  “Oh, this is an amusement park for me. Trust me.”

  “Yeah, that’s how I felt when I first came out here. Now you see why I stay out here? It’s all in the atmosphere.”

  We made it to her three-bedroom, orange-painted flat and gathered my things from the car.

  “Every single house out here is different, hunh?” I guess I was too used to Philadelphia’s uniform designs of redbrick row houses and gray stone twins.

  “I like that though,” Kendra said. “It gives you a feeling of individuality and uniqueness.”

  “It reminds me of Florida with all of the bright colors,” I told her. I had been to Florida a few times for spring break while at Hampton. Florida and California were the only states where I ever saw orange, green, yellow, and aqua houses, but I hadn’t been to every state.

  Kendra nodded. “Yeah, it does remind you of Florida a little bit, but California is a lot more populated. Every time I go to Florida, I always ask myself, ‘Where do the people live around here?’ They have a lot of hideaway housing in Florida, like they’re protecting themselves against floods and tornadoes or something. California’s housing is right out in the open.”

  “What about the earthquakes?” I asked her as we made our way into her modest house.

  “The earthquakes?” she responded, wide-eyed. “Oh, girl, let me tell you. When I first experienced an earthquake out here I lived in an apartment complex in Inglewood on the second floor, and I actually thought that the people downstairs were shaking up the house or something. So I was about to grab my broomstick and beat on the floor: ‘What the heck are you doing down there?’ Then I realized, ‘Oh, my God, this might be an earthquake!’”

  “How often do they happen?”

  She grimaced. “About three or four times a year.”

  I looked at her and asked, “Every year?” She made it sound as normal as a northeastern snowstorm.

  She laughed and said, “Most of them are just small shimmers. You get used to it.”

  She showed me to her guest room that had a brown sleeper sofa and a small color television set. There was nothing to brag about or to complain about at her place. She even had a small backyard with a fence and a basketball hoop. I wondered if Kendra got lonely. She didn’t seem like it. She probably enjoyed the peace that she had. You don’t get much peace in crowded East Coast cities. Something is always going on. On Kendra’s block, it pretty much looked like everyone minded their own business and kept to themselves. I guess it would be hard for Californians to come together on anything.

  After getting situated, Kendra took a deep breath and said, “So, where do you want to go to first? Hollywood?”

  I smiled. “Why not?”

  We walked back out to her car and Kendra stopped to look up at the blue sky.

  “You see how peaceful this is? In Baltimore there was always something distracting me from realizing how beautiful the sky was.”

  I nodded. “I see what you mean. I was just thinking about how peaceful it seems out here myself.”

  We hopped back inside of the car and took off for Hollywood.

  Kendra said, “Usually I would take Route 110 to get to Hollywood, but since you’ve never been out to California before, I’ll take the street.”

  She handed me a map as if I knew how to read it.

  “This is where we are right here.” She pointed with her finger to the bottom of the map.

  Just like she said, Carson was below Compton and right next to Long Beach.

  “Long Beach looks huge,” I commented. “I thought Compton would be bigger.”
r />   “Yeah, because of all those rap songs about it, right?”

  I smiled. “I guess so.” I looked at where Los Angeles was located, all the way at the top of the map. “How long will it take us to get to LA?” It looked like a two-hour drive. I didn’t remember it taking that long for us to drive to her house from the airport, but from what I could tell on the map, the airport was closer to Carson than LA.

  Kendra shook her head and started grinning.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked her.

  “You’re not used to reading maps, are you?”

  I smiled again. “No. I mean, it’s not like I have to use maps that much on the East Coast.”

  She said, “You know what I noticed recently. Women don’t really use directions the way that guys do. When I first moved out here and asked people how to get to places, women would say things like, ‘You go up there, and make a right at the McDonald’s, then when you see a Burger King down the road, you make a left and go straight up.’”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I asked her. It sounded about right to me. That’s how I would have given directions.

  Kendra said, “That doesn’t work too well when you have to travel a longer distance. That’s when you have to know east, west, north, and south.”

  Whatever, I thought to myself. As long as you get there.

  When we stopped at a red light, Kendra looked up to the right, past my passenger seat. “You see that little N and little S at opposite ends of that street sign?” she asked me.

  I looked up and noticed it. We were traveling north on Main Street. It even had the hundred that we were on: 21800.

  I just started laughing. “I know I noticed that on street signs before, I just never paid it much attention. Especially when you already know where you’re going.”

  Kendra shook her head and smiled. “I know Southern California better than many of the people who grew up out here,” she bragged. “You see that?” she asked me, pointing out ugly gray housing complexes that were gated off. “This is South Central Los Angeles. So it’s not all good out here.”